Carbon-neutrality is a tale: the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests | Hacker News Reader

Carbon-neutrality is a tale: the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests

theguardian.com

171 pointsericdanielski94 comments

The only reason this "biomass" is so popular is an artificial reason. It's just a means for electricity companies to continue using coal and basically not doing anything, while selling their power as 'green'. All they need to do is throw a few wood chips in the mix..

This practice should really be banned. Or at least not be allowed to be labeled as green power. But if they did that the governments look really bad because they won't even come close to meeting their Paris accord goals.

So big business is burning the forests for no other reason than a green label .. While not improving anything for the environment.

What angers me most about this is not the burning of forests (which is bad), but how politicians could allow this to happen in the first place.

You can reduce your electricity demand and then buy the remaining electricity from 'true green' providers.

Don't have to wait for the politicians.

That's nice, but the unfortunate thing is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc

It's a Kurzgesagt video about why individual action is far from enough, and why we need systemic action. Do your part, but also pressure politicians, because that's where the main pain point is.

Well yes, do both, do your thing and pressure politicians. still no need to wait for the politicians.

I just loath people putting the blame on politicians, China, capitalism or some sort of world cabal just to have a rationale to continue their own unsustainable style of living.

Shifting to only buying green electricity only actually works if so many people and businesses move to the green energy providers that there becomes more supply of carbon-based energy than there is demand. All that a marginal level of people making the request does is shift what production goes where, and not the overall level of demand for electricity in the grid. And since very few businesses are willing to make this type of change, and businesses consume a greater portion of electricity than direct consumer use, personally switching to “true green” has very little effect on the situation unless it becomes a mass cultural movement to do so.

Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it can only become a movement if enough people put their money where their mouth is and make the switch. But the current situation appears such that, without politicians intervening, there will not be enough entities willing to make such a switch to have an effect on the overall grid. (And therefore without politician intervention, our only real hope is non-carbon based energy becoming so cost effective that it displaces almost all carbon based energy use)

How can it be considered green? Doesn't burning wood produce emissions too?

Not net emissions. 1 ton of carbon was removed from the atmosphere in the tree growth, and that same ton is emitted on burning. Digging up coal that 1 ton of carbon has been sequestered under ground for millions of years, but is now in the atmosphere.

No net emissions if you burn the tree close to were it grew. In the Netherlands we get our biomass from Scandinavia and Canada with boats and call that green energy. Ignoring the fuel for the boats and trucks to move the biomass to the power plant.

Good furnace produce little particulate emission so its almost on par with burning gas.

Biomass - so mostly wood, wicker or straw has all its carbon content coming from the air - they capture CO2 as they grow, when you burn them you release exactly the same amount of CO2, hence they're carbon-neutral.

They’re only carbon neutral if you replant what you’ve cut down.

You don't really have to replant -- coppice and pollard are out of fashion, but maybe they can come back.

Sprout Lands by William Bryant Logan is a fascinating read.

But that's the idea behind the biomass burning.

If you just burn all the forests an be done with it it's a bad idea. But if you replant the forests with fast growing species you can cut them down every 5-10 years and have a lot of biomass to burn in basically a closed cycle.

The new species can be worse for the ecology than not planting. It's not that easy as just plant anything.

It does, but if it is young wood it contains newly captured carbon and so the net effect over a short time period (in climate terms) is that it doesn't change the overall atmosphere.

In comparison to coal or other fossil fuels, which adds tons of carbon that had previously been outside the atmosphere, a net zero over 50 years is pretty green. Of course, this supposes you actually manage to get enough new trees grown in that time which might not be true if forests are logged by clear cutting and not supported after that.

Yes it does, but full burning isn't the only option. You can also char or pyrolize wood to produce heat while leaving behind [mostly] the carbon. The carbon can be easily sequestered by burying it in the ground, or with more difficulty upcycled to industrially useful forms like carbon black, graphene, or diamond.

> The only reason this "biomass" is so popular is an artificial reason. It's just a means for electricity companies to continue using coal and basically not doing anything, while selling their power as 'green'. All they need to do is throw a few wood chips in the mix..

I'm not sure that's the core of the problem, as biomass plants are specialized plants.

I believe the problem reflected in the Guardian article is, again, unintended consequences from policies driven by subsidies.

The EU puts up policies whose goals it tries to meet by throwing money in the form of subsidies to the private sector. However, the private sector (fostered by irresponsible governments from member-states) tries to meet their goals of getting money in the form of exploiting subsidies. Therefore, once the EU puts in place policies that gives away a pile of euros to those that meet the letter of the law (i.e., build a biomass power plant) what we get is a bunch of unsustainable projects that barely meet the letter of the law (i.e., biomass power plants that can't even secure their own supply of biomass).

Taken from the Guardian's article:

> Siim Kuresoo of the non-profit Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF) doesn’t just blame the Estonian government. He says there is a direct connection between the subsidised growth in the biomass industry encouraged by EU renewable energy policies and the acceleration of unsustainable Baltic tree-felling.

Exactly, burning biomass (there are huge corn fields in Poland that end up as biomass in Germany, economy of this is crazy and has zero positive effect on the environment).

The most ridiculous part is that Germany is questioning "greenes" of nuclear energy plants, because they invested in solar and wind power plants plus gas flowing from Russia through Nord Stream 2. I hope France will successfully oppose this madness.

How burning gas or trees is more CO2 emission friendly than nuclear power plant is beyond my understanding, but something tells me that environment is far from being a main point of this awkward exercise that Europe is doing now.

"has zero positive effect on the environment" and a lot of negative effects: pesticides, fertilizers in water, monoculture bad for the animals, etc.

Growing seasonal plants with sole purpose being biomass energy (burnt or whatever) should be banned. Using the leftover is something else, but the amounts are too small.

If that biomass is offsetting coal/oil/gas then there is still a net positive of not adding more fossil carbon to the atmosphere.

The first step in slowing down or stopping climate change is to stop releasing fossil carbon.

Eventually we need to figure out how to sequester the excess carbon, but that's still sadly in the future. It's going to be hugely expensive but still less expensive than losing every coastal city to flooding. Unfortunately the latter is probably going to have to happen before we make progress on the former.

Sequestering/fixing carbon can be done by constructing buildings from wood instead of concrete.

Imagine wooden buildings with wall thicknesses of 30 cm or more.

I noticed 7% of Germany’s electricity production comes from biomass: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

It seemed like a lot to me.

>Biomass, of which wood from forests is the main source, now makes up almost 60% of the EU’s renewable energy supply, more than solar and wind combined, and a vast cross-border industry has emerged to meet this demand.

In the early industrial revolution, European forests were being progressively logged out - the wood was used for construction and to heat buildings, but largely the new demand was from blast furnaces, smelting iron.

More or less, England ran out of forests first, and turned to peat, and then coal, and then along came Thomas Newcomen (he did build on the work of others) with a heat engine to extract water from coal mines... and now, it seems, we have come full circle.

Biomass is a reasonable carbon-neutral energy source, but managed forests are a long-term (centuries) play. Croplands (including pasturing fields as carbon sinks) is better in the near term (a few decades).

NB: The omission of 'fairy' before 'tale' in the headline summary (the original is "'Carbon-neutrality is a fairy tale': how the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests") really changes the meaning here.

"In the early industrial revolution, European forests were being progressively logged out...More or less, England ran out of forests first"

Forest cover (the amount of forest covering the land) has always been small in the UK for the past few hundred years. The Industrial Revolution was not the cause of the small forest cover in the UK.

An estimate from the Forest Commission (a UK government department) is that forest cover in England in the 1100s was only about 15%. After World War I, it dipped to its lowest point - 5%. It's currently about 17% in England (similar in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).

If you are interested in the reasons why, it's discussed in this BBC Radio programme:

More or Less: Behind the Stats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09x66st

The stats I've listed above are taken from the programme. The discussion starts approximately at the 24-minute mark.

That's a frustratingly vague piece.

Bottom line: tree based biomass isn't as good as solar and wind and shouldn't be subsidized as much. But, it's almost certainly better than coal which some places are still using.

What I wanted to know, and the article very pointedly didn't tell me: is this a good thing if we limit to scraps from creating planks for other uses? I think it probably is.

I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale. Eventually the cycle of harvesting trees, burning the wood, and planting more trees is carbon-neutral (minus any carbon from logging and transportation).

But, if the process starts with logging existing forests, this releases carbon (more than coal). It would be "better" to burn coal and plant new trees than to burn wood and plant new trees. This would result in more land being forested - but that's the point.

> This would result in more land being forested

Why? This is an additional variable. You can add additional area in both cases. Why would burning coal add some land that you can plant new forests, and burning wood not?

Bear in mind that in Europe "plant new forest" means "change land use from agriculture" or "change non-forest ecosystem such as moorland to forest". There's isn't a lot of land that's just spare.

I know, that's why I disagree with premise that we can burn coal and magically find new land for forests.

It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples.

But also: for biomass to be carbon neutral compared to some baseline, there would need to be no net change in living biomass. While there's a net negative in living biomass, the cycle is not carbon neutral. The time scales are long enough that it makes a difference. In extremis, coal is not considered renewable or carbon-neutral even though, in s very technically-correct-is-the-worst-kind-of-correct sense, it is.

> It's a hypothetical to make the comparison apples-to-apples.

It's not apples to apples when you magically find some new land that does not exist in the other scenario.Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term, but coal never is.

There are some species that grow very fast - replenishment is not a very long term perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_coppice

> Biomass is not carbon neutral very short term (...)

Well, mankind has been outputting industrial emissions for the last, say, two centuries. It's very safe to assume that most managed forests around have been capturing anthropogenic CO2 emissions for the last century or so.

I take offense at that. Yes, you might be achieving the holy grail of storing carbon, but a collection of identical, equidistant trees with barely any other form of life between them is not a forest, it's a soul-crushing horror show.

Compare that to a strip mine and it is way smaller horror.

It can create place to live for animals, it can reduce particulates in the air. It's not a normal long-living forest that is grown for wood for 80-100+ years but it's still way better than burning coal.

It's not a forest. It's a field, the same as wheat or corn, just that the product is different.

> I think the implication is that it's not necessarily better than coal because burning forests is only carbon neutral on a very long time scale.

I find this assertion to be very hard to believe.

Biomass is the epitome of a renewable energy source. You gather dead vegetation or chop down trees, you burn them to generate power, you plant them again and wait for it to grow. Rinse and repeat. Coal is the exact opposite. Moreover, biomass implies recovering carbon from the atmosphere, while coal implies digging it out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere.

Care to present any evidence or rationale that supports your claim and lends it any credibility? I suspect that what makes your claim utterly unbelievable is making the mistake of succumbing to a kind of "slippery slope" argument, where you feel the need to go a all-or-nothing route and extrapolate what it would take to scale biomass to provide the totality of Al energy needs. In reality, biomass is scaled the other way around: project how much biomass can be realistically provided by a managed forrest, and adjust the biomass plant to meet it's needs.

Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We should Chuck the “renewable” nomenclature from the discourse as fast as possible. We don’t care about renewable we care about carbon neutral. Nuclear is non-renewable but carbon neutral, which makes it far superior to wood which is renewable but carbon spewing.

> Renewable is a misnomer that goes back to the early environmentalist movement. In those days the concern was about running out of energy resources, not climate change. Today we’re drowning in energy, but have a surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

I'm sorry but your post reads like a non-sequitur on semantics, and I fail to see how it adds anything to the discussion. Biomass is renewable in any of the senses you discussed: in the sense of replenishing energy sources, and in the sense of not contributing to emissions as it's role in the carbon cycle is closed.

Nuclear is good. Wood is carbon-neutral. We should use both to move ASAP from gas and coal. Especially that wood is easier to use in some existing coal furnaces.

And if you think that burning wood is carbon-spewing, then thin about what happens in all those forests once the trees age - they either get logged and used for construction, afterwords they get discarded and rot or they don't get logged, collapse and rot. Either way carbon is getting back into the air as CO2.

This is true on the scale of decades, but the problem with climate change is we don't need carbon neutrality for O(50 years). We need carbon neutrality today.

Yes maybe those forests would eventually release carbon in 2050 is all well and good, but very likely we'll have total clean tech solutions by then anyway. In contrast we only have a short window to reduce atmospheric carbon substantially to prevent significant warming by the end of the century. To the extent possible if we can keep carbon sequestered today and pay by having it released in 30 years that's a very good deal. Because it stops the runaway warming today, and it gives us three decades of investment to start sequestering atmospheric carbon.

But now a lot of infrastructure runs on coal. You can use wood instead and have this carbon captured and reused in the next 10 years or you can still burn coal while awaiting a perfect solution.

We have surplus of farmland due to farm efficiency. We have more forests in EU now than we had 10 years ago. Switching to biomass is a good step because every ton of wood that emits CO2 that will be recycled is better than 0.6-0.8 ton coal that gets burned now and adds carbon.

Nuclear fission actually is somewhat renewable in the sense that you can recycle most spent fuel through a breeder reactor and reuse it.

That is logic that works at a local and individual level but breaks down at a global and economic level.

Think of it like fish stocks. A small pond can be managed by an individual to make sure that stock levels are renewable. You are careful to not over-harvest. But an individual fishing boat at sea does not have the same control, because other boats are fishing the same waters. The fish are only renewable if there is collective effort to ensure that.

Oceanic fish stocks are a commons, and suffer from the tragedy of the commons you describe. The way I see it, modern day forests aren't, they have a clearly assigned owner.

But the atmosphere is!

>Care to present any evidence or rationale that supports your claim and lends it any credibility?

I am describing the text of the article these comments respond to. If you have not read the article, that would be my first recommendation.

I will now expose the flaw in your argument:

>biomass implies recovering carbon from the atmosphere

Cutting down a tree and burning it releases carbon into the atmosphere. Planting a new tree removes carbon from the atmosphere.

However, during the period between clear-cutting old-growth forest and waiting for new biomass to capture carbon out of the atmosphere, the process results in net carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If one were to plant new forests on a hypothetical plot of currently-fallow land, wait for those trees to grow, and then harvest those trees, it would indeed be carbon neutral. But trees take time to grow.

Other forms of biomass operate on much faster time scale and don't have this particular problem.

EU population growth rate is sub 0.2% per year, combined with increasing agricultural output and there is actually quite a bit of land available for reforestation.

As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries. The goal is burning for energy not high density wood for construction. Plus burning wood releases energy from both hydrogen bonds and carbon bonds which means you get more energy per lb of CO2. Managed forests are actually a very reasonable use for available land economically vs traditional farming as they don’t need anything close to the same kinds of subsides.

In terms of energy you can hit up to the equivalent of ~60,000 tons of coal per year per square mile, that adds up fast. There are definitely ways to capture more energy, but wood is cheap and scales.

> As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries.

Yes, but the main problem being pointed to here is the logging of old forests (they are nature preserves), this isn't about the fast industrial tree plantations of marginal ecological value.

Where can you grow 60,000 tons of coal equivalent per square mile per year? In the US, the absolute upper end for forestry biomass is more like 6000 and that's in a tiny fraction of land areas. A "good" but unexceptional location would yield closer to 400.

Biomass is nice because you can turn it into chemicals and stored fuel, but the areal power output is very low.

60,000 is kind of the extreme outlier.

Melia dubia for example is 44m3 of wood per acre above ground biomass in the right conditions. That’s 28,000m3 per year per square mile, but a few methods which aren’t currently cost effective like extracting the root ball can apparently boost it further.

> It would be "better" to burn coal and plant new trees than to burn wood and plant new trees.

From a purely CO2 perspective, trees are just stores of carbon, just like coal. I don't get how one is better to burn than the other? If anything that should come out in favor of burning trees, because wood contains more hydrogen bonds (that oxidize to H2O instead of CO2) and because newly planted trees grow much better in logged forests than they do in coal mines.

The difference is that coal contains carbon that has been locked inside the earth's surface for at least a few million years (if not longer).

Trees on the other hand contain carbon that those trees extracted from atmospheric CO2 while growing. Burning those trees merely returns CO2 to the atmosphere that was taken from it a few decades ago. If you do that in a balanced way (growing the same amount of trees that you burn at any point of time), you may create a cycle that does not affect long-term atmospheric CO2 concentration.

My rule of thumb is, if a story vaguely implies that something is worse than coal/oil/anything made by a big pocketed corporation, but they dont come out and directly state that it is, ideally with sources, but just continually insinuate, then it's not worse, and the story is corporate propaganda to make alternatives seem futile.

The problem is that there's a very low percentage allowed in the biomass/coal mix. In the Netherlands this loophole is used a lot to prop up the green power stats.

I think it also highlights that cutting down forests for energy also greatly harms the natural ecosystem that depends on the existence of trees. So there are effects beyond carbon emissions

Here's an idea how to become carbon neutral in a hurry.

New York State is proposing an emission tax on gasoline of 55 cents per gallon [1]. When you burn a gallon of gasoline you produce about 20 pounds of CO2, so NYS should collect about 2.8 cents for each pound of CO2 emitted by ICE cars and trucks. The state could retain 0.8 cents for various administrative and overhead costs and pass on 2 cents to anyone who can scrub 1 pound of CO2 from the atmosphere. In particular to forest owners (by the way, I'm not one and none of my friends are). An acre of forest can remove many thousands of pounds of CO2 per year from the air (for example [2] claims 6k for a generic forest, while [3] says 30k for a 50-year old oak forest). Let's say a given acre scrubs only 5k pounds. At 2 cents a pound its owner could receive a tax credit of $100/year. There are plenty of lots out there that sell for less than $1000/acre (see for example [4], where a 260 acre lot is being offered for less than $200k). That translates in an annual ROI of more than 10%. Where can you find such an investment opportunity in today's markets?

[1] https://www.news10.com/news/ny-news/proposed-green-gas-tax-b...

[2] http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/sequestra...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/science/how-many-pounds-o...

[4] https://www.landandfarm.com/property/261_acres_Cabin_and_Hun...

I was part of a startup accelerator at one point and one stream was technology commercialization. A professor was pitching us on his technology for more efficiently shipping wood pellets across the ocean (I live in Canada) to displace coal in the UK.

At the time we thought this was a crazy business that would rapidly be killed off. And here it is 4 years later, still chugging.

Biomass is total BS and not a green renewable fuel. It's the equivalent of ethanol. You grow it to burn it. Its different in that you aren't releasing fossil fuel based carbon to the planet however if you aren't growing it (which requires resources anyways) and you are taking it from existing stock you are releasing stored carbon.

That said of you are using some biomass to supplement renewable natural gas (IE biogas collected from manure treatment facilities, agricultural facilities, waste water treatment) it helps to augment and make the RNG generation process more robust. In that case it has a use case -- however if you are using solely biomass I don't think it has a lot of environmental merits.

A lot of the wood is imported (via oil-burning ships). At one point I tried to calculate the impact of Drax shifting to wood pellets from Canada, and concluded that if it was limited to local wood it would consume every tree in the UK within a year. I may have my maths wrong, but European forests are a resource that's been depleted for centuries..

> I may have my maths wrong

You do :-) Europeans are moving into denser and denser built up areas, agriculture is becoming more efficient and as a result we can leave more of the continent alone, than 100 years ago.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...

Would you do the work of fishing out the bit that contradicts my maths about Drax?

I don't even know what or who Drax is. Drax the Destroyer?

The largest power station in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station

In particular for this topic, it has a 2.6 GW capacity for biomass, in addition to 1.29 GW capacity for coal.

> Would you do the work of fishing out the bit that contradicts my maths about Drax?

What math? No math was presented at all, only a baseless assertion consisting of a vague claim that all forests in the UK could be wiped out within a year.

I'd love to see this "Draw math" though. Care to show it?

There appears to be very roughly 500 million tons of wood in English forests, so Drax would need to use a little over a million tons per day to work through it all in a year.

I’ve not been able to find a mass estimate for UK forests, but UK timber production appears to be 10.8 million tons per year, if I’m comprehending this right: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statis...

For the entire capacity of Drax (not just biomass), 3.9 GW-years / (18 MJ/kg) — the energy density Wikipedia lists for “wood”, but I bet it is more complicated than that — I get 6.8 million tons/year.

The Wikipedia page about the power station says in 2013 they planned to import 7.5 million tons.

I found forest area and mass for some other places, and the forest area for England. 10.8 fits, that means trees are between 50 and 100 years old on average when they're cut (not all of the wood is usable for timber, so it's not just 50, and the UK is bigger than England).

Your error is not one of math. "If <a> were to do <b> then <c>. Therefore we actually are doing <d>." Note the shifting verb tense.

Sorry, this is off topic, but the relevant difference between the particular were you are using and are isn't one of tense but of mood. The were is a past subjunctive form, where "past" is there more as part of the name of the form than a description of its meaning. The are is present indicative. The part described with were isn't in the past relative to the part described with are, thus it is not a distinction in tense. The were part is counterfactual and the are is factual, a distinction in mood.

I will probably be voted down for saying this, but I am a linguist, specifically a semanticist, and I find the association between "past"* subjunctive forms and counterfactuality fascinating.

* Note, there are some constructions where the "past" part is semantically past as well, but this isn't one of them.

Sorry about that. I never have understood the difference between tense and mood, to be frank ;) Thanks.

No need to apologize. Most people say "tense" just meaning "verb form". I just saw the opportunity to point out something I find interesting.

So everybody is challenging pjc50 on this, let's put really numbers in:

- In 2019 the total UK wood removals (harvesting) was 10.8 tonnes [0] of actual wood (for timber, furniture, pulp, etc.)

- In 2019 Drax alone (1x single bio-mass plant) burned through 7,05 tonnes of bio-mass (labeled 'feedstock') of which about 81% was actually imported from the US and Canada. [1]

So basically 1x single plant (arguably the largest) just burned through the equivalent of about 70% of the UK's harvested wood (assuming you would stop all wood construction and paper production etc.).

As I wrote in another comment, we just do not have the land surface area for bio-mass in Europe and the number of bio-mass plants is now completely out of sync with the actual wood production capability partly due to a terrible energy policy and incentives.

[0] https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/documents/7721/Complete_FS...

[1] https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Drax_AR2019_...

It's super interesting to see that Australia doesn't hold a monopoly on having completely brain-dead anti systemic thinking people in charge of developing environmentally friendly sustainability policies.

I live in Denmark, and I am so frustrated that my country has invested so heavily in biomass plants for heating and electricity. We are supposed to be one of the countries that lead the way and demonstrate how the rest of the world can de-carbonize, but even if biomass was truly carbon-neutral (and I doubt that it is, at least in the short term of the next 50-100 years) it does not scale to the rest of the world, because we would need to have planted the forests for that a long time ago.

I live in an area that is planned to get central heating from a biomass plant, but I have chosen to invest in a heat pump instead. Yes, this will in part be driven by electricity from biomass, but hopefully our energy mix will become more sustainable in the near future, and at least I won't be locked into 100% biomass for the next 30 years.

Biomass takes 5-10 years to grow. Given that it can be used in many coal furnaces it is imo the best "now" solution.

co2 emissions is just one of the sustainability dimensions. Biodiversity is another one. We need forests (and other non-managed areas) to give the rest of nature (literally) some room to breathe.

As someone who enjoys nature quite a lot but doesn't know anything about forestry, I am always surprised by the damage done by cutting a single tree. There is always a wasteland of 15 m radius done by the truck that has to come right in the middle of the forest to carry the tree. Surely that cannot be good for biodiversity.

If you do the forestry right you create many plots in there and aim to cut down e.g. 2% in a given year. That mean you will get the whole forest replaced in 50 years. If you're careful to not cut too much in a single space then the animals and plants can move around and it should be ok for biodiversity.

Now for the energetic biomass - this is more like 5-10 year rotation so while the animals can move around the plants can't. Those will be mono-cultures to sustain energy demand until we have enough of some other energy sources.

In my village in the Netherlands, a great amount of greenery has been eradicated in this last year. Gone are almost all the brambles with their delicious harvest, all we have now is grass, grass everywhere. Surrounding villages have the same problem: if it's green and could be cut down, it's now gone.

I strongly suspect this is because the government has mandated a minimum amount of 'biomass' to be produced. God help us for the next year, we'll probably lose all the remaining trees.

Well that's depressing.

I live in an area were most of the houses (+2 flats) use pellet (also in summer for hot water production). The air quality drastically dropped. It really "burns" the lungs some days.

I suspect that:

- combustion is not properly done most of the time and there is no need to have filters in the chimney.

- some pellets must not contain only "clean" wood

We are only waiting to move to a place with single familly houses because (in my area) they mainly migrate from petrol-gaz to solar energy (thermal) and heat pump (water-water).

Few years ago I worked on an biomass tarehouse project for one of Poland's power plants. One of supported kinds of biomass was palm kernel shells. Palms do not grow neither in Poland, nor within 500km from its borders. Yet someone considered it a good solution to produce "green" energy.

agree that neutrality is a tale - in trying to emit less, we emit more for the short term

its probably not an exaggeration to say that all the conveniences, innovations and economic growth of the past 100 years rely on fossil derived energy to various degrees

Is there a reason this old article from January was posted again now? As someone from Estonia, it's quite biased in my opinion and takes some fringe viewpoints and presents them as representing my people.

I believe much of the wood pellets are coming from the US, I know in the south many reject trees are used for pellets. Still, we can't pretend burning anything for power is allowable for our biosphere.

"Wood pellets are sold as a clean alternative to coal. "

Well, it's because they are. Managed forests are renewable. It's the same for all the paper/cardboard stuff replacing plastic bags.

> Managed forests are renewable

Fair let's accept that.

The issue is that the amount of managed forest area in Europe versus the amount of bio-mass furnaces is completely out of sync. These furnaces spend a huge amount of mass just to heat-up and another huge chunk to sustain in order to break even.

All of the managed forests in Europe put together are unable to sustain these wood burning furnaces and they are happily importing wood pelets from the US/Canada/Malaysia etc. (often with tax payer subsidies).

None of this energy generation is carbon neutral and absolutely none of it is sustainable. It is the wrong model and an even worse implementation of energy policy.

Europe does not have the surface area for this. If we need more non-intermitent energy sources we would be better off applying this money in France's mini nuclear reactors or in geo-thermal bore drilling for non-geothermal areas.

Thanks for clarifying, makes sense and I agree with this.

Though some burning furnaces operate also with trash/gas (the latter to start the fires usually). And it is better than coal, surely.

But yeah I'd rather see the money on nuclear/geothermal/etc

> All of the managed forests in Europe put together are unable to sustain these wood burning furnaces and they are happily importing wood pelets from the US/Canada/Malaysia etc. (often with tax payer subsidies).

> None of this energy generation is carbon neutral and absolutely none of it is sustainable. It is the wrong model and an even worse implementation of energy policy.

It sounds you're making a couple of mistakes along the way: presuming the current state of biomass output is at a steadt-state, and following a miopic train of thought where you confuse a ramp-up stage with a steadt-state.

Regarding the current biomass output being out of sync with production, the Guardian article that sparked this discussion states quite clearly that Estonia's problem was that it's licensing process failed, motivated by the need to grab the most EU subsidies they possibly can. Therefore this motivates spending as much cash building up infrastructure that's largely overprovisioned. This is a systemic problem with all kinds of EU subsidies, but that does not mean the potential biomass production level should be interpreted as a fixed variable and everything else should be solved with regards to it.

It's not clean, when it:

- emits CO2, far more than any other fuel per unit of heat/energy gained

- emits huge amounts of pollutants

We have better alternatives and we should use them - despite the fossil fuel giants which would like us to rather stick to their existing infrastructure and revenue streams.

Every bit of emission should be avoided, the atmosphere doesn't care about its source.

This:

> - emits CO2, far more than any other fuel per unit of heat/energy gained

Is a fossil fuel industry talking point. It's implying that coal is better. (The 'fact", as sated is true, the implication is false though)

But the rest of your comment is quite anti-fossil fuel.

So, are you pretending to care about this or have you been hoodwinked by the coal barons?

> We have better alternatives and we should use them

My country (Belgium) is preparing to build more biomass plants because it is presented as our only option.

Unless your alternative is rolling blackouts, very keen to understand what we're missing.

Pellets release mostly carbon that was already in the atmosphere. Total CO2 release matters far less than total fossil CO2 release.

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